tempus fugit

Comment of the Day

Empirical Conservatism

United States

12:40 PM 4 December 2015

The Times continues to see the trees and not the forest.

It’s not climate science the GOP is fighting. The Republicans must attack the scientific method itself. They are required by their politics to attack the very idea of empiricism. If they admit that science can achieve irrefutability in this area, then they must admit that it has and can determine it elsewhere, particularly in areas where they need ambiguity and room to lie: public health, environmental law, even the historical record. They aren’t attacking what’s happening in Paris. They are defending their right to pathological subjectivity and the right to externalize its costs onto people who eagerly accept it.

The Left keeps making the same mistake: they detect instances but not the pattern. They diagnose after the fact. This gives liars the freedom they have to strike and move and strike again.

Karl Rove explained all this years ago, when he told your reporter, “”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” The whole Conservative battle plan is right there. How long before you figure it out that for one moment he was telling the truth?

[Comment to an NYT article about Representative Lamar Smith’s attack on a climate science paper that states global warming pause was illusory]

It’s the scientific method itself that the Republicans are fighting. The very notion that reality is a mutually agreed concept that can be tested and confirmed to everyone’s satisfaction. The Republicans want to impose their own reality which you will have to accept because they will use force to make you . That reality cannot be the subject of reasoned discussion but must be precisely the way they say it is. Nothing can be modified or contested.

Like this:

These are the beliefs that have put a great political party heading to destruction. Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans passes legislation funding the transcontinental railroad during the Civil War. As the party of business, promotion of the scientific method was the Republican Party’s core beliefs.

Now it has been taken over by Southerners, the region that has always been the poorest and least educated of the United States.

The Republicans were rightly blamed by voters for the Great Depression. They had no power from 1932-52 apart from control of Congress in 1946-48.

It took former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower to bring them back to power by accepting the large government policies of the New Deal and continuing the federal government’s promotion of government funded scientific research to bring them back to power.

The anti intellectual promotion of ignorance alternative to reality belief of Karl Rove cannot succeed in the increasing educated and more informed populace of the Internet age. They Republicans are facing a 20 year absence from the Presidency Rove himself predicts

It is well deserved for those whose success has been made by promoting ignorance